... The company places him in the affluent, cloistered home of a prominent employee as compensation for the loss of a biological son, cryogenically frozen while awaiting a cure for his fatal disease. David, played by perpetually slack-jawed Haley Joel Osment, is a perfect human simulacrum, programmed with all the positive attributes of a normal kid: lacking the customary mix of defiance and manipulation, he is hardwired with "a love that will never end." The exclusive object of this love is Monica Swinton (Frances O'Connor), who is at best ambivalent toward the new arrival and otherwise behaves with startling hostility, the least sympathetic mom in the annals of Spielbergian family drama. As Brian Aldiss, whose tiny 1969 source story underwent numerous script transformations, has confirmed, it's about a boy who "whatever he does, cannot please his mother." When David's flesh-and-blood "brother" is brought back to life, he doesn't stand a chance in the ensuing sibling rivalry. Ill-equipped to handle the devious, malicious tactics of real pre-teen monsters, he is summarily abandoned by Mom in an archetypal forest with only his faithful robotic teddy bear for company. Another of Spielberg's "lost boys" in search of parental nurturing, David must navigate a cruelly futuristic environment, bristling with pockets of lower-class technophobia, to find Pinocchio's Blue Fairy, who he believes will magically turn him into a real boy capable of sustaining his mother's love. Befriended in their adventures by Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a sex machine on the lam for a murder he didn't commit, they ricochet from a vicious "Flesh Fair," where discarded "mechas" are annihilated for the viewing pleasure of rural yahoo "orgas" (organics), to the CGI splendor of a zippy Oz called Rouge City. Their quest ends in a partially submerged Manhattan where David meets his scientist maker, attempts a form of robo-suicide, and comes face-to-face with the mythical fairy in an underwater Coney Island. A.I. is divided into three well-marked chapters, each with its own dramatic arc and distinctive visual facade. Unlike Spielberg's earlier calculated thrill rides--or for that matter, the relentlessly entropic pull of Kubrick's narratives--the storytelling here is awkward, sputtering, full of gaping plotholes and unresolved gambits, most notably the fate of Gigolo Joe. Still, it bears the writer-director's sentimental imprint, his faith in the salvific force of childhood imagination. In the epilogue, which constitutes the third section. David is revived after 2,000 years by a breed of glistening extraterrestrials, super-machines intent on studying him as the sole surviving witness to the long-extinct human species. At last, his singular wish is granted & sort of. The machines clone undeserving Mom from a lock of her hair preserved by Teddy, and David gets to spend one perfect day basking in the radiance of maternal plenitude. If not quite a real boy, he achieves an idealized emotional harmony we humans unconsciously crave but can never fully realize in our adult lives. ...
